Learn more about Warner and he Auburn lotus in Issues 2 & 3 of the IWGS journal this year.

A few years ago Pairat Songpanich hybrized what is the worlds first hardy (inter-sub-genetic) waterlily with a blue (lavendar) hue. The good news was that one existed the bad, the plant has produced no natural offspring since 2007.

A few weeks ago in July hybridizer Mike Giles who has studied waterlily genetics and history for the better part of a decade produced a wonderful hardy purple….very purple. UPDATE 8-17-2010: Named “Purple Satin”

WHO IS MIKE GILES?

That was going to be a blog post of mine for a few months. My buddy Tim in Houston Texas has been sharing Mikes hardy hybrids with me for most of this year. Until the news of a successful purple I thought Mike would be going into the history books for creating some wild and fascinating waterlilies based on the pads. I saw much of Mikes new work when visiting San Angelo Texas where over a dozen new varieties are on display this year. The lilypads are beyond fancy in my opinion. The flowers are all very pretty but the pads blew me away.

As I write this tonight, if you know anything about waterlilies I am not going to be able to impress you with all my photos and videos of the pads as you want to see the worlds first hardy purple tropical. Tim Davis has waited a long Time to introduce Mike Giles to the world and Mike’s story will be well known and is fascinating as you may soon learn.

So do me a favor and  head over to my buddy Tim’s Website as he introduces you to Mike and this yet to be named purple Hardy waterlily.

Visit the InternationalWaterlilyCollection.com to view this new lily

I will have Mike’s videos and photos of the new regular hardy waterlilies on here soon and please visit his work this late summer of fall if you can at the International Waterlily Collection in San Angelo Texas.

-Zac

Nymphaea Bull’s Eye: Developed by Florida Aquatics this new waterlily is the most correct Red a tropical day bloomer has achieved until this point. Often hot pink or rosey this adult plant is Red and when very mature nearly maroon.

From Florida Aquatic: The flower color is the real eye-catcher on this lily. The red color is deeper or more of a true red than any lily on the market today. This flower will catch your eye from quite a distance away. Set on a vigorus, compact plant with solid green pads we expect this lily will be well received.
The closest comparison with N. ‘Bulls Eye’ would be N. ‘Jack Wood’ however the flower color of N. ’Bulls Eye’ is much darker than N. ‘Jack Wood’ and the flower has many more petals, up to 50 when mature.

Turn on the volume to hear Tim, the side view in the 2nd half shows realistic color of the flower.

Enjoy in High Definition and Full Screen

Bull’s Eye is currently on display in San Angelo at the International Waterlily Collection 2010.

Bulls Eye can be purchased at www.PondMegastore.com

For Dates & Details visit www.IWGS.org

Special Thanks to Rolf Nelson & Nelson’s Water Gardens for efforts far beyond the video.

With the click of a mouse, I saw it was true. From this day forward, Hardy Waterlilies will NEVER again stand as a slightly less impressive plant in the shadows of amazing vibrant tropical waterlilies. “Wanvisa” has arrived! I know what you are thinking >>>insert photo here<<<<. I do want you to come back and check for more news and it will eventually show up here along with a flood of others.

On its way to the international waterlily collection in San Angelo, my buddy is currently growing the AMAZING waterlily. Developed by Mr. Nopchai Chansilpa of Thailand. The plant will be on display in San Angelo Texas from July through Lilyfest in September. Nopchai will be present at San Angelo this fall if you would like to meet him. Likely the first peak presentation will be around the July 3 / 4th time this summer.

Other inside information straight from Ken Landon himself via Tim Davis tells a story of massive planting and work underway in San Angelo. The pools are filling with more lilies each day and the young Victoria’s I believe have been added. Ken has a small staff of some great ladies helping him and has just finished working with kids volunteering before summer break. From years past the site looks something like this…

Water-Garden-Blog is staying on top of the many many announcements coming from the San Angelo IWC and will have reports coming all summer long as we anticipate the aquatic event of the Decade.

Many more hybrid waterlilies, interviews, and important topics like the White List are being worked on.

The video is great in 720 High Definition.

This video is for use by Tim Davis, Water-Garden-Blog, IWGS, and International Waterlily Collection of San Angelo. Sharing unedited on Facebook or Twitter is OK.

Tim Davis is a hobbyist water gardener and waterlily hybridizer. When he can, he volunteers to help Ken Landon at the International Waterlily Collection (IWC) in San Angelo, Texas. One of his first hybrids is named Debbie Ann after his wife. In his free time he enjoys gathering data on waterlilies and hybridizers, running the IWC San Angelo website and is also webmaster for the International Waterlily and Water Garden Society as well as the current Journal Editor.  He has a website (here) where he will sell some of his plants online in the summer and is a strong advocate of Ken Landon Fertilizer and Pond Tabs Fertilizer. In the future you will see Tim gets 5-10 blooms (sometimes more) per day off of single plants in relatively small containers.

Part 2

Buy Fresh Lotus Root (tubers) see this quick sample

For a really good time, if you are into cooking and like the food network. The 100th episode of the JAPANESE verisonof Iron Chef is dedicated to Lotus cooking. I love Iron Chef America but the Japanese version is a little hard with the music and dubbing. The funniest thing about this is a few seconds into part 2 the iron chef states he has never cooked lotus before. The secret ingredient must be used in every dish. Perhaps Japan is a less common Asian favorite of Lotus.

Part 1    Note its about 7 minutes when they unveil the Lotus so you can fast forward.
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Lori Shontz
The Penn Stater magazine

— At first, all George Griffith wanted was a pond. Just a little one, somewhere in a corner of his family’s land in western Pennsylvania. 

After getting permission to dig one, he saved his money to buy a couple of goldfish to live there.

After a couple of weeks, the fish died. So Griffith – only 8 years old – began studying to find out why, and within a couple of years he was not only breeding his own goldfish, but earning money by selling them to five-and-dime stores, including the one where he had purchased his first pair.

That was only the beginning. Goldfish led to guppies. Turtles. Canaries. Myna birds. Orchids. And water lilies. Griffith paid his Penn State tuition with profits from George’s Aquatic Gardens and Pet Supplies, which made him an important guy in some corners of campus.

The Daily Collegian noted in a 1956 article that Griffith, a 1956 PSU graduate, sold “30,000 goldfish a year” and added “The collegian pastime of swallowing goldfish by fraternity pledges has also boosted his sales.”

The goldfish paid the bills, but they were never his true love and focus.

That was the pond. Griffith has spent his life expanding on that original water garden, and he now has more than 30 lily ponds on his 80-acre property, a former potato farm along a mountain road outside of Ligonier.

“There’s just something magic about a water lily,” Griffith said.

“They’re the diamonds of the water.”

And he doesn’t have just any old water lilies; he develops his own. 

Griffith has hybridized hundreds of them over the years and the dozen or so he has deemed worthy to propagate are part of his water garden. He also has a lotus that’s a direct descendent of a plant more than 2,000 years old.

No, Griffith never does anything halfway. “I love too many things,” he said. “I get too excited.”

Plenty of people are slowing down at his age, 77. But Griffith is still running The Flower Barn, the business in Westmont he owns with his partner, Thomas O’Brien.

That’s an uphill battle sometimes, he said, because of the increasingly popular phrase in death notices, “in lieu of flowers.”

That cuts into profits, but Griffith thinks there’s a bigger cost to society as a whole. 

He explained, “Flowers forever have been an expression of all those things we cannot express as we would like to.”

Griffith has been expressing himself with flowers since he cornered the market on black orchids (which are white orchids dyed) when they were popular in the 1950s. He then moved on to designing flower arrangements for gala events all over western Pennsylvania and beyond

– even at the White House and about

17 states.

“He’s very precise – a perfectionist,” said Donald Miller, a former art and architecture critic for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. 

He has attended dozens of galas marked by Griffith’s distinctive style. “And frankly, that’s what they best do: Make every effort to do it right.”

O’Brien put it this way: “You cannot pull anything over his eyes. From the bookkeeper on down, he is one step ahead of everyone.”

Griffith was only a junior in college when he made his first botanical splash. When word came that President Dwight D. Eisenhower would give the Penn State commencement speech in 1955, Griffith was asked to put together a floral display.

He went big, floating 2,000 water lilies on the pond in front of the president’s home (now part of the Hintz Family Alumni Center). And because the blue and purple tropical water lilies he wanted didn’t bloom so early in Pennsylvania, he had them shipped from Florida.

Life magazine published a photo of Eisenhower and his brother, Penn State President Milton Eisenhower, posing by the flowers.

That’s how Griffith came to have a lotus plant with an ancient legacy. It came from a seed found at the bottom of a Manchurian lake; initial carbon dating showed it to be at least 2,000 years old, and he said it is among the oldest seeds to ever be germinated.

The lotus was growing in Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Gardens in a rough neighborhood of Washington, D.C., and Griffith learned that children were vandalizing the garden. So he asked Milton Eisenhower for help, and Eisenhower enabled him to get a “division” of the rare lotus, which he is still growing.

Griffith’s connection in D.C. grew. In 1981, he and O’Brien decorated the White House for a state dinner honoring the prime minister of Japan. Nancy Reagan, who was famous for requesting specific flowers, regardless of whether they were in season, wanted water lilies. 

Those flowers were blooming, but there was still a problem – they bloom only during the day, and the dinner was at night.

Griffith solved the problem by injecting the floral equivalent of muscle relaxants into the stomata, or base, of the cut water lilies. (He still laughs at the fact that he was “drugging” the flowers as the White House mounted its “War on Drugs.”) But the flowers stayed open, the first lady was pleased, and Griffith and O’Brien have continued to do occasional displays for the White House ever since.

Closer to home, Griffith has specialized in creating spectacular spaces for parties and museums, including for the openings of Pittsburgh’s Heinz Hall and the Hunt Botanical Library at Carnegie Mellon.

Miller particularily remembers a gala at the Carnegie Museum of Art for an exhibit of French decorative panels the museum obtained from the ocean liner Normandie. 

The tables were adorned with cornstalks sprayed with gilt paint to resemble huge candelabras, and the unadorned walls were bathed in a bright, Carribbean blue. “Man, was that spectacular,” Miller said. “It was out of this world.”

But Griffith’s finest work might be a private one – his roughly 30 lily ponds. He and O’Brien have built the ponds themselves during the past 25 years and many of the colorful lilies are Griffith’s own. There are hardy lilies (which overwinter in the ponds) such as “Lemon Chiffon,” which is light yellow, and “Rachel Hunt,” which is very large and white. The tropical lilies, which must spend the winter in greenhouses, include the blue-purple ones he has named “Blue Skys” and “Elsie” (as in his friend Elsie Hillman, the Pittsburgh philanthropist). Griffith’s peach-colored lily, created about a decade ago, is named “Tom O’Brien.”

Some of those same flowers will be blooming at his alma mater. He has donated about 100 of his plants to The Arboretum at Penn State, which has a 30-foot lotus pond in the H.O. Smith Botanic Gardens. Among those are water lilies that he has developed (they are unnamed for now) and another division of the rare lotus from Manchuria.

Those are varieties that have taken decades to hybridize, but Griffith thinks in terms not of time, but of beauty. “It’s joyful and it’s a love,” he said. “You just hope for the excitement of crossing two plants to come up with a wonderment.”

Matt Garver in Indiana e-mailed me in January that he was going to be overwintering his tropical lilies outside in a half whiskey barrel like container with a built in heater to keep from freezing. The device is known as a thermoplanter.

A couple weeks ago he checked to see how the plants were and we have the photos of what seems to be stable live lilies. I would dub these “Chilly Lillies”.

Kudos goes to Mark Prescott the developer of the thermoplanter. Just a 70 watt heating element has kept plants alive up and down the east coast, to St. Louis, and now north to Northern Indiana. Visit Black River Nursery LLC to see all thermoplanters Mark has developed.

What may help on your first attempt at overwintering a tropical lily is choosing cold tolerant plants. viviparous waterlilies are more cold tolerant as are most star varieties of tropical waterlilies.

Matt notes he has overwintered the purple Panama Pacific Waterlily.

Rich Sacher wrote a nice review of the thermoplanter about two years after its 2006 introduction at pondapalooza for Water Gardeners International. Thermo Planters for Waterlilies and many other plants can be found and read about at Black Creek Nursery and are available from a number of vendors for just $50-$75.

Matt used the thermoplanter unit inside a half whiskey barrel for added protection from the elements on top of gravel instead of an in-ground pond. The heating element sits inside the soil next to the tuber so even if the water above the pot is cool the tuber stays warm enough not to damage. Very nice report and thanks to a Water Garden Blog reader. Anyone is encouraged to share stories and we will check back with Matt as the growth continues to see how early the plant blooms.

[UPDATE MARCH 31 2010] Matt sent in an updated zoomed photo of the Panama Pacfic.]

Right now 3 water lilies (out of 1000s) are approved for year one.  Given that hundreds exist in displays around the state including the famous International Waterlily Collection in San Angelo. All other varieties must be destroyed by Dec 31 2010 even though they pose no invasive threat.

Why is this going on? What happend to black listing invasive plants? This very quickly will destroy nursery, garden center, produce, farming, and other jobs. Who gets to pick what plants are legal? A panel or appointed board.

Moving on to Iowa, a new city law will require certified plumbers to install ponds and must include bottom drains to sewage (raising the cost of installations probably 50-400%).  Is every landscaper and pond builder going to have to school to become a certified plumber or will they be put out of business?

A jog north to Wisconsin, a state law is on the table requiring homeowners to register, get a permit, and inspection for all water garden installations. This again will increase the price of having such a hobby outside. Do you want to be bothered with permits, inspectors, regulation for a 6×10 area of your garden?

Meetings are underway to develop a team of watchdogs, state by state, to identify this kind of legislation and work with legislatures to avoid damaging the industry. As soon as some watchdogs are assembled we will post them here so that they can remain in constant contact should you hear of anything in the works. Now is a great time to join the IWGS or other affiliates as there will be strength in numbers.

100′s of Pond Plants and Waterlilies